Case Study - Swain & Co Solicitors

Doherty Associates is a long-term UK Microsoft Gold Partner, embracing Microsoft 365 and SharePoint to help businesses boost productivity, empower employees and cut costs. Having successfully moved over 20,000 users to the cloud, Doherty Associates are one of a few UK partners at their size to have five gold competencies, mainly around their expertise in cloud services.

With 3 offices nationally and a wealth of confidential information, it was important that Swain & Co had a system in place to store information confidentially, whilst information could be shared securely throughout each national office. GDPR and increased security were growing issues for the law firm. As IT consistency, collaboration and security were all main concerns for Swain & Co, Office 365, SharePoint, OneDrive and Azure would be implemented to modernise IT infrastructure revolutionise business efficiency.

Challenge

Existing processes at Swain & Co were highly manual, with all information based onsite and an aging IT infrastructure. A lot of procedures were still handled through paper forms and processes were not yet digitalised. This was widening the gap for security breaches as there was a limit to how safely information could be stored in each office, especially with confidential information on paper. It was also a challenge for information to be shared between offices. Information would either be sent by post or when sent electronically the process would be elongated through scanning and emailing. This made collaboration inefficient and the existing technologies were interfering with potential levels of productivity. Their IT across their 3 offices were autonomous from each other so Doherty Associates were asked to consolidate this to deliver greater efficiency across their business.

The new environment needed to provide a full digital transformation. An agile approach was taken with Doherty Associates outlining through consultations how the implementation of Office 365, Azure, SharePoint and OneDrive would all achieve Swain & Co’s overall objective of digital transformation, demonstrating how each product could be utilised and their key benefits.

Solution Strategy

Having established a solid understanding of Swain & Co’s existing systems and procedures, Doherty Associates were able to draw out a plan for migration and adoption of new productivity applications to create a modern workplace.

The technologies used to create this journey to the Microsoft Cloud were:

Office 365 – an essential part of Swain & Co’s migration

SharePoint – allowing for files to be stored in a centralised location

The migration to Office 365 and the implementation of Azure Active Directory (AAD Connect) provided a common identity for users on-premises and in Office 365, Azure, and SaaS applications (that were integrated). It was also the most effective way of migrating on-premise Active Directory services to the cloud, allowing for roaming, remote and hot desking users. A proof of concept for SharePoint was also created. Moving Swain & Co’s case management system (CMS) to a fully cloud based platform meant that the organisation would see a huge return on investment due to features surrounding content organisation and tagging. Swain & Co are currently migrating from this proof of concept. The final part of the migration phase was the roll out of Microsoft Teams. This meant that telephony could be cloud based and users could be assigned “anywhere access” whilst also providing an all-in-one collaboration solution.

Results

Swain & Co found that the solution revolutionised the way processes were managed throughout the organisation. The new system allowed them to access the files on the go through access to their Microsoft applications on multiple devices. Files could also be accessed in any Swain & Co office, increasing efficiency and productivity.

Customer Quote

“Swain and Co. Solicitors are very pleased with the way in which Doherty Associates have project managed the refresh of our IT systems and continue to support us with the day to day management of our systems etc. and we would have no hesitation in recommending Office 365 to other organisations.”